Multiple Image works II

These four 'portraits' of Akira Kurosawa developed from the earlier triptych/multiple image pieces, extending the idea of dealing with time.

Red Earth (for Akira Kurosawa) is a rearrangement of Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon. This film interested me because of its underlying non-linear form. It is a kind of visual detective story (event) where the viewer repeatedly goes through the same territory and images, unearthing not the truth but the web of rationalised truths and lies created by the protagonists. At the heart of the film is death and deception. It is the tangle of stories and its rearrangement of time that makes Rashomon a subject for my work. This triptych is an attempt to tell a 3 dimensional narrative that also relates to the various temporal modes of the computer.

The second of the Akira Kurosawa pieces, And/Or is comprised of images from the life of the director. With this piece my works have come to try to visualize how a character might be constructed from 'building blocks' of memory and incident. And/Or and Chorus begin to focus on some images repeating in small blocks, setting up rhythmic patterns, and interacting with varying 'current' under layers in different ways.

Chorus is constructed from a single digital sound waveform image of a fleeting moment of birdsong. Algorithmically created surfaces are layered with single film frames which both interact with the waveform transforming the image into rhythmic sets of colour variations.

Voice for lightbox and digital sound takes the reflexive nature of language, experienced through echo and reverberation, as its starting point. Once again algorithmically created surface patterns are interspersed with photographs and a sound wave pattern. These visual interpretations of experience are augmented by an audio element that plays with details of sound and silence as well as movement. The sound is meant to give an expanded duration to viewing the image but could also be seen as a focused slice of time in a larger field.

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